In 1948, Harry Truman ran for President on a campaign calling for national health insurance, and civil rights for African-Americans. The man from Missouri won the election, desegregated the military-- but did not succeed with medical insurance.
In 1965, Medicare passed, and President Lyndon Johnson honored Harry Truman's fight for health insurance by giving him the nation's very first Medicare card.
In 2010, another man named Harry took on Truman's fight, trying to make health insurance available for every American.
It was not a popular issue. The odds against it were enormous. But Harry Reid's motto might well have been: "The buck stops here", as it was for Harry Truman.
And the Senator from Nevada prevailed. On March 23rd of this year, President Barack Obama signed sweeping health care insurance reform into law: America won.
Today, Harry Reid is taking on another difficult and unpopular issue: this one for the poorest of the working poor -- those who slave the hardest, and get the least; impoverished men and women, against whom almost every hand is turned--the illegal immigrants.
I have two reasons to honor his stand.
First, as a young man I worked one summer in the fields, picking strawberries for a dollar a quarter-mile row. It took three hours to complete one row, and it was the most miserable work I ever did. The blasting heat, the stabbing back pain, the absence of even minimal amenities: people sleeping in cardboard boxes by the field-- and the filthy wooden outhouse, with buzzing flies and a dried corncob for toilet paper.
But the people who had nothing were kind. One old brown woman showed me how to make a little more money by stemming strawberries too big for the baskets, whereby I earned maybe fifty cents an hour, instead of thirty-three.
As we worked, she told me her story: how she and her husband walked across the border in Southern California, and were now following the harvests up and down the state, picking whatever crops there were, and sending money home every payday to her sister, who took care of her children.
To me, that woman was a hero; she was fighting for her family, enduring misery day after day, year after year, so her children might have a chance at a better life.
And the second reason Harry Reid is honored in my family?
Gloria, my Mexican-American wife of 41 years, is a citizen, born in California. But if she were to visit Arizona, after their new law goes into effect next month, she would be at risk of jail, for nothing except her ethnicity.
On July 29th, Arizona's anti-immigration law goes into effect. That state will become like a Nazi war movie--"Show us your papers!"--as police become not merely permitted but required to challenge anyone who looks "illegal": in other words, Mexican. Despite a sugar-coating of empty words and "sensitivity training", the new law will be racial profiling, pure and simple.
And what kind of jail is waiting for anyone who looks Mexican and cannot prove their citizenship?
Joe Arpaio's jail. Calling himself "America's toughest sheriff", Arpaio brags he feeds his dogs better than prisoners. Dogfood costs $1.21 a day; he keeps immigrants alive on a third of that, 41 cents a day, giving them surplus food, and only two meals a day. Backed up by his 160 deputies, and a volunteer militia, Arpaio keeps the prisoners outside in the suffocating heat, works them on chain gangs, and humiliates the men by making them walk around in pink underwear--as if Arizona were trying to become Abu Ghraib.
Fanning the flames of anti-immigrant hysteria is a useful distraction for some: like Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who recently angered her constituents by imposing a one-cent sales tax increase. By signing the new law, Brewer changed the subject politically.
And Arizona Senator John McCain? Once, like former President George Bush, he supported a reasonable immigration policy-- including a path to citizenship. But he has since switched to an "enforcement only" approach, bigger fences, more guards. He attempts to justify the reversal, calling border violence "the worst I have ever seen".
Is that correct? Is there a wave of Mexican hard-core criminals flooding into Arizona?
No. Illegal immigrant numbers are in fact down: two-thirds down, way below what they were ten years ago.
According to U.S. Homeland Security data, in the year 2000, "... 725,000 people were apprehended illegally crossing the border in Arizona ... By 2009, (that number) had plummeted to 249,000."
- "What Immigrant Crisis?", Bryan Curtis, Daily Beast, April 29, 2010 .
And crime? A murder was recently committed by someone who may have been an illegal immigrant. That's right: a murder. Compare that to the front page of almost any city in America --try and count up all those killings-- one murder does not constitute a crime wave.
--"Violence is not up on Arizona border despite Mexican drug war", Dennis Wagner, The Arizona Republic, May 2, 2010
Common sense applies: drug dealers have money, guns, and cars; immigrants have the clothes on their backs, a few crumpled paper pesos--and they are on foot.
Who are the illegals, really?
Many are parents: mothers and fathers so desperate for honest work that they will walk into the Arizona desert. The trip across is agony: imagine a blister that covers your entire foot. Lose your way, or twist an ankle, the penalty is agonizing death by dehydration: like being burned alive from the inside.
Illegal immigrants risk their lives for their families. Is that not self-sacrifice at its highest? Remember the Good Book: "Greater love hath no man no man than this: that he lay down his life for another."
Nevada's Harry Reid understands this: maybe because he grew up in a family that did not have a lot. His dad worked in a mine, his mom took in washing: and to get to high school young Harry had to hitch-hike, forty miles a day.
What a difference between him and his three opponents! At a recent debate, candidates Sue Lowden, Sharron Angle and Danny Tarkanian practically fell all over each other, vying to be the most cruel in their anti-immigrant positions. They seem to have forgotten that (unless Lowden, Angle and Tarkanian are Native American names) they too are descended from "illegals"-- ancestors who came to America without an invitation.
Political demonization of immigrants has happened before.
When the Irish first arrived, starving from the potato famine, they faced discrimination: "No Irish need apply" was the ignorant catch-phrase..
The Chinese Exclusion Act banned an entire ethnic group from our country for decades, to our shame.
Remember Proposition 187? That anti-immigrant law was voted into law in California, before it was found unconstitutional.
Today, unless stopped by an over-riding federal law, individual states could imitate Arizona and make a patchwork quilt of legalized cruelty.
But Harry Reid has what is needed: a national immigration reform law, ready to go. It contains a strengthening of borders, to be sure, but also a concern for humanity: those already in the country will be treated with respect: as "Lawful Prospective Immigrants", not criminals. Their path to citizenship will not be easy, but it will be achievable: the reward for decency and hard work.
That is how America should be.
And Senator Reid is fighting for that law right now, not at some undisclosed and politically safer time in the vague and distant future. He is willing to risk his job for it.
"...We're going to have comprehensive immigration reform now... just as we passed health care reform..."
--"From Senate Majority Leader, A Promise to Take Up Immigration Overhaul", Julia Preston, New York Times, April 10, 2010
Harry Reid does not choose his battles for their popularity, and has been written off again and again, like Harry Truman, whose approval ratings slipped as low as 22%, and who was widely predicted to lose the 1948 Presidential elections to Thomas Dewey.
But everyone remembers how that one came out.
America will always need leaders of compassion, conscience, and courage.
People like Harry Truman.
And Harry Reid.
Give 'em Hell, Harry.